The Spirit of Christmas eBook

It is not necessary to put a message like this into
high-flown language, to swear absolute devotion and
deathless consecration. In love and friendship,
small, steady payments on a gold basis are better
than immense promissory notes. Nor, indeed, is
it always necessary to put the message into words
at all, nor even to convey it by a tangible token.
To feel it and to act it out—­that is the
main thing.

There are a great many people in the world whom we
know more or less, but to whom for various reasons
we cannot very well send a Christmas gift. But
there is hardly one, in all the circles of our acquaintance,
with whom we may not exchange the touch of Christmas
life.

“Beautiful friendship tried by
sun and wind
Durable from the daily dust of life.”

After all, Christmas-living is the best kind of Christmas-giving.

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A SHORT CHRISTMAS SERMON

KEEPING CHRISTMAS

Romans, xiv, 6:
He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto
the Lord.

It is a good thing to observe Christmas day.
The mere marking of times and seasons, when men agree
to stop work and make merry together, is a wise and
wholesome custom. It helps one to feel the supremacy
of the common life over the individual life.
It reminds a man to set his own little watch, now
and then, by the great clock of humanity which runs
on sun time.

But there is a better thing than the observance of
Christmas day, and that is, keeping Christmas.

Are you willing to forget what you have done for other
people, and to remember what other people have done
for you; to ignore what the world owes you, and to
think what you owe the world; to put your rights in
the background, and your duties in the middle distance,
and your chances to do a little more than your duty
in the foreground; to see that your fellow-men are
just as real as you are, and try to look behind their
faces to their hearts, hungry for joy; to own that
probably the only good reason for your existence is
not what you are going to get out of life, but what
you are going to give to life; to close your book
of complaints against the management of the universe,
and look around you for a place where you can sow a
few seeds of happiness—­are you willing
to do these things even for a day? Then you can
keep Christmas.